Downloaded feed items won't publish to the front page

I'm seeing this as well, with 6.x-1.2.

http://groups.drupal.org/node/9198/feed is the feed.

Feed settings:
Comment settings: disabled
Workflow settings: Published
Refresh feed on creation: checked
Update existing feed items: checked
Feed nodes inherit taxonomy settings from parent feed: checked
Node type of feed items: Feed item
Promoted items: 0 (which it claims will leave the setting alone)

Feed item settings:
Comment settings: disabled
Workflow settings: Published, Promoted to front page

No dice. :( The items are successfully being imported, but they're not getting the promotion flag.

I'd like to see this feature actually done by an add on module, like a workflow module.

That said, probably we should keep it in FeedAPI, as it has been in it from the get go and people kind of expect it.

I also don't know how easy it is to implement a promote x feature with add on modules.

Hm. I don't really see this as a feature, I see it as "don't monkey with the workflow settings I set at admin/content/types."

Let me explain how it works (the [maybe bogus] thinking of the developer :) ) then decide:
By default FeedAPI always ensures that "Promoted items" setting (this is an option of the feed node!) is ok. For example that this field contains 5, FeedAPI always set the first 5 node (ordered by timestamp) to published and made the others unpublished.
You can disable this whole stuff if that field (promoted items @ Processor settings @ feed node) is totally empty.
For developers, the exact condition:
if (is_numeric($feed->settings['processors']['feedapi_node']['promote'])) {
If that field is empty, feedapi uses the content type of "Node type of feed items" setting default value.
So maybe the problem is only a 0 value at a wrong field.
I hope i could explain the things is a straightforward way. If not, please complain! ;)

Please share your ideas how promoted top N items setting should work or generally: does feedapi have to have such a feature?

This is too old open ticket, the summary is good enough to help.

Just want to make this clear to anyone searching, as I was confused after reading this thread: if you want FeedAPI to respect the nodetype's default for promotion, "promoted items" in the feed processor settings needs to be blank rather than zero. Being zero, no items will be promoted to front page. Being blank, it will fall to the target nodetype's setting.

I hope that was sort of clear.

This is still an issue, and I ran into it again today.

So the problem is that PHP generally thinks 0, NULL, empty, etc. are the same thing. So in this respect, leaving the field empty is effectively setting it to 0, which means "Don't promote anything" which has the exact opposite of the desired affect.

If I set the field to 'banana' instead, it fails the is_numeric test and this works fine and properly respects my feed item's publishing settings. However, "banana" is not a very good workaround. ;)

Let's try this instead.

Oh, incidentally, this will have the side-effect of not respecting 0 as "don't promote anything" but OTOH, if you really want that, wouldn't you just uncheck the "Promote to front page" box?

http://drupal.org/node/246604